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Posting Travel Expenses Automatically to Financial Accounting

by Paul Ovigele

October 2, 2011

Paul Ovigele, Ovigele Consulting

The travel management module allows you to record your travel expenses in the SAP system as “Trips”, and with the proper approval, allow them to be settled to the financial accounting module. There are a number of ways of recording trips: by using transaction PR05 to enter the expenses; by using transaction TRIP to enter travel requests and expenses; or by using the “Employee Self Service” (ESS) portal, to enter travel requests and expenses. The approach that is taken varies with different organizations – the first two are available within the SAP ERP system, and the third requires the ESS environment to be set up in your SAP landscape. Whichever, approach that is used the method of posting to financial accounting is generally consistent. I will detail the steps that are to be taken to post a travel expense trip to the financial accounting module.

Trip Settlement – Once the trip has been approved, it can be settled. This is done using transaction PREC. You would need to enter a payroll area (which groups employees for payroll purposes, but is also needed in the Travel management module) and the period of settlement. Then you can choose whether to settle a particular employee’s trips, a particular trip, or all trips for all employees in the period.

Posting Run Creation – Once the trip has been settled, you can perform a posting run which collects all the trips that can be transferred to accounting and designates a posting run number to them by using transaction PRFI. You can choose whether to post a particular employee&rsq uo;s trips, a particular trip, or all trips for all employees in the period. With this transaction you can also choose to whether or not replace incorrect CO objects with the cost center that exists in the Travel Privileges infotype 0017 of the employee. To do this, you can select the “Replace incorrect CO objects” checkbox.

Posting Run Management – For all the trips selected from the “Posting Run Creation” step, you can post them to financial accounting by using transaction PRRW. You simply enter the username of the person that created the posting run and enter the date of creation. When you click on the ‘Execute’ button you will see a list of posting runs that can be transferred to the FI module. You can then highlight the relevant posting run and click on the ‘Post’ button. You will then get a message asking if you want to transfer the documents immediately or create a background job. If you click on the “Post immediately” button and there are no FI/CO errors with the document, then the accounting module will be immediately updated.

If you do not want to perform all these steps manually, you can create each one as a background job in sequential order. To create transactions PREC and PRFI as jobs, you can simply go to the transaction and go to the menu “Program -> Execute in Background” to schedule the job as normal. To create transaction PRRW as a background job you need to execute program RPRPOSTD. You can then select the “Post” button and the “All possible posting run” button, and then go to the menu “Program -> Execute in Background” to schedule the job as normal.